Boot Hill Blaster began as a submission for a NES-themed game jam where games had to use palette, resolution, sounds, and music available on the original Nintendo Entertainment System. The demo represents the state of the game as it was submitted and can be found on its game page on this site and on itch.io.

A full version of the game is still in development and will feature at least one more monster type and a soundtrack. You can listen to the soundtrack right now on SoundCloud. The songs and sound effects were created using FamiTracker. The game itself was written from the ground up and uses all original graphics.

This new version introduces some substantial changes to gameplay and fixes a few bugs.

The magician's special ability has been changed from "Mana Shield" to "Reflection" so instead of using up precious mana to absorb damage, the magician is able to reflect all damage back to the attacker for one turn. This is particularly useful if you find your magician surrounded by several enemies. The rogue's "Sneak" ability now lasts until your next turn instead of only one move and the warrior's "Berserk" attack has been made more powerful.

Every character class gains HP and MP each time they level up. Previously, players could sometimes be killed with a single hit from a boss. Additionally, the game now tells you what increases when you level up and by how much.

Since you have more HP, the bosses were also given more HP and MP, more monsters were added to the maps and selling items yields less gold. To help save gold, curing poison is now a separate health purchase. Before this update, curing poison was coupled with completely healing the player, which could sometimes used a lot of gold. Separating the purchase gives you the choice of resting to recover health instead of paying.

Arrow recovery has been altered such that you can always retrieve each arrow that hits an enemy. Previously, arrows would not be dropped if the enemy dropped another item, like an axe or sword. This was extremely annoying when it took all of your arrows to kill it. Consequently, the price to purchase arrows was also dropped to 2 gold pieces and the rogue now starts with 10 arrows instead of 7.

For those who dislike the fog effect that sometimes occurs for a level, it can now be disabled on the Options menu.

This release fixes a bug that caused the game to throw a NullPointerException on systems that have their video card refresh rate set to an odd numbered amount, like 75 Hz. A few other rare gameplay bugs have also been fixed.

I hope that version 1.2 makes the game more enjoyable for everyone and, as always, feedback is appreciated.